I do not believe anyone dying in the state of Grace can fail to go to Heaven ultimately. That seems to be heresy to me, respectfully. And SBC seems to agree now based on what they say below, read carefully, especially the last paragraph:
No one believes that someone can die in a state of grace and not be in Heaven. But this sounds a bit like begging the question. You're assuming that someone in the New Testament can 1) be in a state of grace in the first place without Baptism and 2) allowed by God to die in that state without His ensuring that they receive the Sacrament of Baptism.
Since you cite that passage from SBC, if you read the entire thing, you'll find that St. Augustine, considered by many to be the father of BoD, vehemently rejected BoD toward the end of his life. Some of the strongest statements against BoD in existence (cited in that article) come from St. Augustine. And the ONLY OTHER Father some reference as a proponent of BoD is St. Ambrose. But his oration at the funeral of Valentinian was ambiguous at best. Valentinian was killed by Arians for rejecting their heresy, so did St. Ambrose posit a Baptism of Blood? Or, recall, this was before the days of Twitter and the Internet. News of the details did not travel quickly. Did one of his attendants perhaps baptize him as he lay dying? All St. Ambrose said was that he received the grace that he sought ... totally open-ended, and in no way proof of his endorsement of BoD. In fact, in his
De Sacramentis, St. Ambrose taught: " Now, even the catechumen believes in the cross of the Lord Jesus, wherewith he too is signed; but unless he be baptized in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, he cannot receive remission of sins nor gain the gift of spiritual grace."
So here's the state of the question among the Church Fathers:
Some believed in Baptism of Blood (including some who explicitly rejected Baptism of Desire).
St. Augustine speculated about it in his youth (saying something along the lines of how he had gone back and forth on the question, finally deciding that "it seems to me"). This was no statement of some authoritative teaching from Tradition. Then in his later years, he vehemently rejected it.
Then you have the ambiguous, inconclusive oration for Valentinian.
THAT'S IT. You had about 5 or 6 Church Fathers EXPLICITLY REJECT Baptism of Desire.
Even Karl "Anonymous Christian" Rahner had the intellectual honesty to admit this (and he would have loved to say that the contrary was true):
. . . we have to admit . . . that the testimony of the Fathers, with regard to the possibility of salvation for someone outside the Church, is very weak. Certainly even the ancient Church knew that the grace of God can be found also outside the Church and even before Faith. But the view that such divine grace can lead man to his final salvation without leading him first into the visible Church, is something, at any rate, which met with very little approval in the ancient Church. For, with reference to the optimistic views on the salvation of catechumens as found in many of the Fathers, it must be noted that such a candidate for baptism was regarded in some sense or other as already ‘Christianus,’ and also that certain Fathers, such as Gregory nαzιanzen and Gregory of Nyssa deny altogether the justifying power of love or of the desire for baptism. Hence it will be impossible to speak of a consensus dogmaticus in the early Church regarding the possibility of salvation for the non-baptized, and especially for someone who is not even a catechumen. In fact, even St. Augustine, in his last (anti-pelagian) period, no longer maintained the possibility of a baptism by desire.
St. Fulgentius, a disciple of St. Augustine, also explicitly rejected Baptism of Desire.
After him and until the time of Hugh of St. Victor (about 600 years after Fulgentius) there was hardly a peep about this subject.
Right before the scholastic era, there was a revival of St. Augustine. So enamored were many of St. Augustine that the Church felt the need to condemn the proposition that it was permitted to prefer an opinion of Augustine to Church teaching.
In any case, Hugh of St. Victor argued FOR BoD, while Abelard argued AGAINST it. Abelard, also, by the way, was the first to reject the Augustinian tradition that unbaptized infants suffered in hell, and the Church sided with him and made Limbo her own doctrine.
To help resolve the dispute, Hugh of St. Victor wrote to St. Bernard. St. Bernard tentatively came down in favor of BoD based on his false impression that St. Augustine held it unequivocally (vs. having rejected it at the end of his life) and also based on a tenuous understanding of St. Ambrose on Valentian. He said he went with Augustine and Ambrose out of reverence ("whether in truth or in error"). He gave no actual theological defense of the opinion.
From there the opinion made it into Peter Lombard's
Sententiae, which was the manual that essentially kicked off the scholastic movement. St. Thomas picked it up, and then of course it went viral due to his authority.
At any point here, do we have ANY evidence that BoD was revealed doctrine? We know revealed doctrine through either the unanimous consensus of the Fathers (and we see there was none about BoD as several Fathers rejected it and only a couple tentatively believed it) or else if one can demonstrate by argument that the doctrine derives implicitly and necessarily from other revealed truth. No such demonstration has ever been made.
This is why I refer to BoD as speculative theology. It is not revealed truth, nor is it even definable as such. Certainly, many Catholics held this view, but never has there been any theological proof of the position. St. Robert Bellarmine, for instance, simply gave as his reason that the contrary (that a catechumen who died without baptism could not be saved) "seems too harsh" ... emotional theology. St. Gregory nαzιanzen and St. Augustine both explained that BoD speculation came from people who watched some devout catechumens who appeared devout pass away without Baptism while other scoundrels who lived terrible lives snuck Baptism in on their deathbeds. People considered this "unfair" and so speculated about a BoD. But St. Augustine realized, as he matured, that this emotional "reasoning" was nothing but a "vortex of confusion" that needed to be rejected if one "wished to be catholic." It opens up massive cans of worms when WE start speculating about what we believe would be fair and what would not be fair ... and trying to impose our standards on God.
As for BoB, many Fathers accepted it, and none explicitly rejected it. But some of the earliest Fathers considered it merely an alternate mode of receiving the Sacrament itself, and not an exception, as they saw the recipient washed (in blood vs. water) and posited that the angels said the words of Baptism to supply the form ... thus making it a Sacrament.
THIS is the status quaestionis of Baptism of Desire.
Topic: EENS for baptized Christians (Read 15463 times)